The Texas comptroller has refused to certify the new state budget, citing the requirement in the Texas constitution that all state budgets have to be balanced.

Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn rejected the state’s $117.4 billion budget on Thursday, sending the two-year spending plan back to the House of Representatives to rewrite before the end of the current fiscal year on Aug. 31.

“This is the first time a Legislature has sent the comptroller a budget that is not balanced,” Strayhorn said. “I cannot certify this budget because it is $185,900,000 short.”

The state constitution requires that the Legislature pass a balanced budget and it cannot be sent to the governor’s desk to sign into law without the comptroller’s OK.

“We need a certifiable ‘pay as you go’ budget by mid-July or the schools won’t open in September,” Strayhorn said.

The legislature is claming that it’s just a clerical error and that they put 2005 instead of 2006 by accident with regards to the allocation of some funds.  Regardless, the comptroller says that she cannot simply take their word for it and she has to go by the actual content of the budget as passed by the legislature.

To get an idea of just how messy this budget is, consider this:

Strayhorn said that her office tallied the financial effects of more than 4,000 pieces of legislation to arrive at the conclusion. One of the “paramount” developments was a last-minute transfer of $236 million from the General Fund to the Texas Mobility Fund, she said.

  I’ll never cease to be amazed at how much crap politicians can cram into a 140 day session.  How in the hell are we supposed to keep up with that much legislation? 

This promises to get interesting, because it is likely that the budget will have to be reconsidered in a special session.  Governor Perry was planning to call a special session to consider the redistricting issue (which has pissed off the Democrats so badly).  Now it appears that it may get taken up by budget issues, which might give the Dems leverage to derail the redistricting effort.

As of this morning, the local TV news was reporting that Perry is considering a lawsuit against the comptroller to force her to certify the budget.  I also heard some Democrat on TV saying that social services has been “cut to the bone” and that we should reconsider the “whole tax structure” in a special session.  That sounds suspiciously like socialist double-speak for increasing taxes, which is political suicide in Texas.

I think we’re going to have to watch these bastards really closely during the special session to make sure that they don’t raise taxes.